BuddyPress Support; introducing Boone and hnla

We’re proud to announce that Boone Gorges and hnla have joined the BuddyPress Support team. Their knowledge of BuddyPress, site deployment, theme design and plugin development complements the existing team and will expand the range of topics we are able to help you with.

Our support team, which also consists of Jeff Sayre, Paul Gibbs and Ray, frequently traffic the forums, help resolve problems, and share their advice and best practices. We’re all you’ve got, and we’re not so bad after we’ve had our coffee.

On the default BP template, we need the main menu to provide pull downs for multiple pages under each. For example, our newsletter, hoover over and it should display the pages for each month of 2010.
Many other templates do this but the default buddy press does not. How can this be accomplished?
Thanks in advance!

@ankka There are 3 core committers and 7 moderators, 5 of which are currently active and 2 of which are retired but welcome back at any time. 🙂 If you meant total members registered at this site, looks like 12,741 visible members with profiles, but we have many more thousands registered, since we’re linked to both the wordpress.org and bbpress.org user tables.

Sweetness. Congrats yall. I guess with @BooneBGorges leading the BP Ninjas team it’ll be kind of like trial by fire. @hnla seems to be pretty handy in Trac too. I’m looking forward to the improvements yall. 🙂

Just to be clear, the last time I checked there weren’t barrels of money stamped with the Automattic logo floating around the Bay. 🙂

BuddyPress as a project is really not about funding; it’s about the community building itself with BuddyPress. I would love to see more core committers too, but I’d love to see them be able to make a sustainable living as independent BuddyPress developers, consultants, and specialists in this field, just like people hire Drupal or WordPress developers. Creating a successful niche social network is a skill not everyone has, and a marketable one too I think.

We’ve done a good job of following WordPress’s lead so far, so I’m anticipating a bright future 😀

@JJJ; I have to disagree: it IS about the funding. But the funding is hidden away behind the “Follow us, follow us!” Open Source banner.

You say, “Just to be clear, the last time I checked there weren’t barrels of money stamped with the Automattic logo floating around the Bay”. Really? $29 million flowing into Automattic during 2008-2009 I remember reading. And how much since then..? That money does not go on envelopes and coffee.

Open Source might mean free to many, but the word ‘free’ does not mean a free meal for everyone. Many plugin developers hope (and try) to may some pennies from their work, and others – myself included – charge for their time in setting up sites with Open Source tools (I tend to use Drupal). But let’s not kid ourselves: those behind the behemoth WordPress has become are making a seriously good living from it, all supported by those who jump on the train and provide their time and effort for nothing, in the hope of some future income.

Without wishing to sound overly critical or whizz on someone’s bonfire, I wonder how well Automattic, WordPress, bbPress and BuddyPress would do if suddenly – very suddenly – every single plugin author and other freely contributing helper just downed tools..?

It won’t happen because of the nature of things. But please, don’t keep trying to act like Open Source software is some aesthetic ideal we should all aspire to, and contribute to for nothing. Those who talk about it in such terms are usually being paid, or are hoping to get a leg up somehow.

Paul, it would be very helpful if you could post standard requirements for hosting BuddyPress. How much php memory do you need to run BuddyPress? Can you run BuddyPress on a shared host? What are some of the issues you’ll face when installing and configuring BuddyPress on top of a current version of WP 3.0 with 1,000 users and 80 MB’s of content in a database. I hope the BuddyPress team can provide some sort of documentation on this. I know we have the forums, but it would be helpful to have a quick guide. Thanks.

[…] into a development career has been an increased participation in the WordPress world. In July I was made a moderator on the buddypress.org support forums. In October, I was brought on as a committing developer for […]

[…] into a development career has been an increased participation in the WordPress world. In July I was made a moderator on the buddypress.org support forums. In October, I was brought on as a committing developer for […]